Can I Work Out Twice A Week On Consecutive Days?

The article concerns the following question – Can I Work Out Twice A Week On Consecutive Days? One of the most important things that you must make sure you’re doing to see optimal results is ensuring that you structure your workout routine properly. Improper workout structure can lead to lack of progress and worse yet, overtraining syndrome. Understanding how to design your own workout program will be critical to avoiding this and help to ensure that you see the results from the hard work you put in.

One question that you must ask yourself when designing your workout is whether you can work out twice a week on consecutive days.

The Type Of Workouts You’re Performing

The first thing that you must look at when answering this question is what type of workouts you’re performing. Are you doing full body workouts or upper/lower workouts?

If you’re doing an upper/lower workout set-up and working the upper body on one day and the lower body on the next, this is a perfectly acceptable way to structure your workout program.

Since each muscle group will still have more than 48 hours to rest after the workout is completed, there won’t be any threat to your recovery.

If you are planning on two full body workouts however, then you run into some problems. Not only will each muscle group fail to get the 48 hours of rest it needs to make a full recovery, the CNS will be overly stressed as well.

Remember that the CNS is worked every time you lift a weight in general. A full body workout is incredibly taxing on the CNS so pairing two full body workouts back to back would lead to a very high level of fatigue.

So all in all, two full body workouts back to back is definitely not your most ideal approach.

What If There’s No Other Option?

For some of you, due to lifestyle factors you may only have the option to work out twice per week on back to back days. You simply can’t make it to the gym any other time so this is how it has to be.

What’s your best option then?

Your best option then will be one of two choices. First, you could choose to just workout once per week. This isn’t going to produce the most optimal results as you will generally need a higher frequency per week. Twice per week per muscle is the recommended minimum for results.

So the second solution would be to perform your two full body workouts, but do the first one first thing in the morning on the first day and the second in the evening on the second.

You do have to have the time schedule to permit this, but overall, it will be best as then you’ll almost have the two full days of down time between them.

Also make sure that you are eating a higher carb diet on the days that you are doing the workouts as this will go a long way towards making sure that you are providing your body the nutrients it needs for that full recovery.

This is definitely a tricky situation to deal with but if you’re smart with your approach, you can see success.